Month: August 2015

This is it! The final chapter in the most disjointed, unconnected series ever. But it’s been fun.

So far Sam has been a dissatisfied medieval girl, a high school graduate, a girl with a sick mother, a painter, an abuse victim and…a demigod? What is the only thing missing from that list? Yup, the future.

Well, there are a lot of things missing from that list, but I’m writing about the future today.

I decided to save the post-apocalyptic story till the end for two reasons: because it was the most requested by far and that I knew it would be one of the most fun to write!

Thank you to literally everyone I talked to who told me to do this particular type of story, and I hope you enjoy 🙂

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Survival 101: Don’t keep your feet on the ground. Of course, that would be a lot easier if we had hoverboards, or rocket shoes, or something other than a pair of roller skates two sizes too big.

It was Ryan’s idea, he said that if there was anything worth taking from the garage, it would be the roller skates, seeing as we don’t know how to drive a car and bikes would be too big and too conspicuous.

I watched him run as I balanced on a faded, broken deckchair, him expertly weaving through the patches of green moss, me just barely keeping my balance on a large chair, wobbling and desperately trying not to touch the ground.

Every time the moss started growing a bit too close for comfort, Ryan backtracked and ran around in a serpentine pattern on the dusty sands towards the garage.

“It’s safe!” he yelled, “Come on Sam, we haven’t got much time!”

I took a breath, before jumping down from the flimsy deckchair, trying to replicate his movements exactly, because we knew all too well what happened if you put a foot wrong.

“You made it,” he said, grinning, “I thought you would be moss-meat by now.”

“Moss-meat,” I scoffed, “Did you seriously just say that?”

He flashed me a scowl, “You knew what I meant.”

Turning away from me, he began picking the lock on the garage door, because we both knew that going inside the house would not be a good idea.

“Remember that this could not be a good idea,” he murmured as the lock clicked open. Noticing my face, he hastily added, “But it is our only choice.”

“Fine,” I grumbled, taking a step back as the garage door flew open.

“Roller skates!” cried Ryan, excitedly eyeing the two pairs in the corner of the room and running towards them.

I breathed a sigh of relief that the garage remained, for now, plant free. “Okay, let’s find what we need and get the hell out of here.”

“Put them on!” he called, chucking a pair of roller skates in my general direction and beginning to lace up his own.

“Are you serious? This is your plan?”

“Do you have a better idea, genius?” he retorted.

“I might. What else do we have in this garage?” I began to rummage through various boxes and containers, Ryan ignoring me and still putting on his roller skates.

“Hmm, what if we used the-”

“Sam.” Ryan interrupted, and I would have been mad if not for the sudden urgency in his tone. “Sam, put the skates on.”

“What?” I rolled my eyes, “I thought you were being serious.”

“I am!” He stood up, wobbling a bit and skated over to my side. “Look.”

I whirled around and my eyes widened. “Crap.”

Coils and coils of mossy vines were enveloping a lamppost about thirty feet away from the garage where we stood, growing at an alarming rate. I reckoned we had about a minute to move.

“Help me with these.” Ignoring the fact that the roller skates were too big – a fact that I was going to have to deal with – I began lacing them up as Ryan did the same on the other foot. Of course, now my shoe-tying skills were the one thing saving my life, I fumbled around and had to redo the laces.

“Okay, go go go!” Ryan began sailing out of the garage, and I followed. Well, attempted to. The disadvantages of having shoes too big for me were starting to show, as I came crashing down to the ground, Ryan already gaining ground.

“Ryan!”

He stopped, and turned back, eyes widening as he saw the moss growing towards me. “Get up! What are you doing on the floor?”

Conserving my energy, I thought dryly, but heaved myself up and started to roll away. I noticed that Ryan was heading towards a large outcrop of rock that jutted out several hundred metres away. I also realised that we were being surrounded. Vines began closing in on all sides, weaving and ducking through each other, creating a woven lattice of leaves, blocking our path.

“Quick!” Yelled Ryan, still a few metres ahead of me, the rocky hill getting ever nearer.

I pumped harder, moved faster, breathed deeper. It was getting harder and harder to keep up the same pace as I inhaled more sand than air with every gulp, and all around me the colours I could see were slowly fading away to a sea of green.

“Sam!” I could see him on the rocks now, holding his hand out to pull me away from the monster plants.

I used all my energy and worked harder to move, reaching out, until finally our fingertips made contact and I was being pulled up to safety.

As I lay gasping for breath, trying to calm myself down, Ryan just whistled and muttered, “And that’s why you don’t mess around with GM crops, kids.”

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That’s it! It’s the end. I’m slightly sad now, this has been a lot of fun! If anyone is interested in me possibly doing this again in the future, then that’s definitely something I’ll consider 🙂

Thank you so much to anyone who has commented or suggested anything, and thank you to everyone who has supported me, even if it’s small, it means a lot!

I’m closing the lid on the box of my creative writing for now, but I’ll be opening it again at some point, I promise!

Wow, part six. I don’t think I’ve ever done a part six of anything before.

Okay, this prompt was actually texted to me by someone who didn’t want to comment, but it was “put your character into a story world that already exists, and try to write in the style of that author.” Let me just tell you that it was ridiculously hard to choose one of my many favourite fictional universes to place my Sam into, but finally I’ve made a choice.

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Giant snakes are the new top of my list of things that will absolutely ruin your day. Normally I would be able to walk through the park and go to a music lesson in peace, but apparently not today. It usually takes around twenty minutes to leave my apartment, walk a short distance through Central Park and arrive at the music studio, but this was obviously going to prove a bit more… complicated.

I saw it curled around a tree, puffing round circles of smoke up into the branches and startling the pigeons that were roosting there. It was astonishing: over a hundred Americans in this area of the park, and not one person was running and screaming, or even looking at it funny.

As I stood there watching it, a woman in a suit speed-walked past me and muttered, “Disgusting stoner,” in the general direction of the lizard. I raised my eyebrows. What was she talking about? Unless there were a group of people smoking behind the snake, I had no idea what she could be referring to.

I took a couple of steps in the dragon’s general direction: unfortunately that proved to be the wrong decision, as its head immediately snapped round and it fixed its huge eyes on me. Oops.

It glided around and around the tree until it was fully elongated, and holy hell, it was at least ten feet long, probably more, with I-could-totally-extract-dinosaur-DNA-from-you amber eyes and a gaping black abyss of a mouth lined with razor-sharp fangs. Oh, and as if that wasn’t enough, it happened to have spines along its back and tail, just in case there was any way that it’s scaly green skin would have problems trying to protect itself.

And me? I had a backpack with a clarinet and a water bottle.

What was I supposed to do? Call 911 and say there was a dragon in Central Park?

The monster began to advance, sliding forward in a zigzag pattern without breaking eye contact with me, rendering me helpless in its gaze. A pigeon flew too close to the creature, and it snapped it up in one fluid movement, and while that was absolutely terrifying, that gave me an opportunity to pull the clarinet out of my bag, grasping it like a baseball bat in the hope that it would give me some kind of idea as to what the hell I was supposed to do.

The snake had finished with its snack, and fixed its eyes on me again, hissing as if it was mocking me. Poor girl. She thinks she can defeat me with a glorified musical stick.

“Shut up,” I told it out loud. It scowled, evidently not appreciating being told to shut up, and lunged at lightning speed towards my face.

Time seemed to move in slow motion, and next thing I knew my clarinet was missing a piece, and the monster was recoiling, several of its spines on the floor.

Did I just do that? Me, the girl who tripped up the stage in her school play, suddenly was holding her own against some hell-beast at ten o’clock on a Saturday morning in the middle of New York.

A piercing whistle and the sound of thundering wheels suddenly appeared behind me, and I was faced with the decision of looking behind me, momentarily having my back to the monster, or keeping an eye on it before it struck again.

Luckily I had my decision made for me.

“Get out of the way!” Yelled a voice, and I instinctively dived to the side as something came barrelling past me.

Getting up from the grassy ground, I saw one of the strangest things I had ever seen, and that’s saying something considering the lizard that started it all. Two teenagers, a boy and a girl, were jumping down from a horseless chariot, dressed in full battle armour. It was almost as if they knew that this snake would be there.

The girl looked towards me, and then said something to the boy, who nodded. They instantly split up, like they’d been trained to do this somehow, one running to me and the other towards the monster.

“Hey,” said the girl as she ran towards me, “are you alright?”

“Um, what’s going on?” I asked, fixated on the sight of the golden sword in the boy’s hand as he began to bang on the ground, shouting “Hey! Over here!”

The girl followed my gaze and laughed. “Don’t worry about Jason, he’s been in enough battles to know how to hold his own. Hi.” She said, extending her hand, “I’m Piper.”

“I…I’m Sam,” I said, dazed. “Do you guys do this all the time?”

She laughed again, gesturing to her full suit of battle armour. “Do I look like I’m out for a morning stroll?”

I smiled, and she picked up my slightly battered clarinet. “Hey, anyone who has the nerve to fight off one of ancient Greece’s most powerful monsters with a clarinet is okay in my book.”

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What did you think of that? If you know what story series I was writing about, please leave a comment and tell me what you thought of my interpretation 🙂

I am really enjoying writing these stories – I hope you are enjoying reading them as much 🙂

Today’s story was suggested by Ayay!

I am attempting to write about something that could potentially upset some people, so I guess it’s trigger warning: abuse. If I offend anyone I’m really sorry and it was not intended :3

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Behind closed doors. That’s a phrase that people say a lot, and I guess that everyone has their own definition. There are a lot of things that happen behind closed doors, and you never really know what is happening behind any one but your own.

I don’t know if my story is normal, I don’t know what other people are like. This is hard enough for me to write anyway, but thank goodness for anonymity, because if I was caught writing this… I’m not even going to think about it.

You see my home life is a little…different from most people. My friends seem to love my parents; that’s probably because my mum is always baking cookies, my dad is always telling really bad jokes and generally they act like normal people.

That is all well and good, but the minute the door closes I can feel it coming, and I turn around to, “What were you thinking? I’m sure she was bored the whole time she was here, you’re such an idiot, Samantha.”

And so it continues, on and on, until she tires of my silence. It’s normally a slap on the arm, several most days, and then I am sent to my room while they discuss my behaviour in the room downstairs.

Yes, most teenagers nowadays would love to be sent to their rooms, but not me. I don’t have a computer or a TV or books or games or anything. I may as well not have a mobile phone, because they track who I call, who I message, what websites I go on, everything.

I wear long-sleeved tops every day under my school shirts, which means that I overheat sometimes, but I never get any questions about the bruises on my arms.

They tell me that it’s normal, that every parent should be doing this to their child. That’s their idea, that they’re some kind of visionaries that have created the ultimate discipline method to control their daughter.

One day I came home with a B on my report card, and if I close my eyes I can still hear the sound of belt against flesh, shoe against flesh, and everything else that happened that night, no matter how much I try to shut it out.

What’s wrong with me? Am I not good enough? Clearly not.

My name is Samantha, and finally I’m opening up about this thing that has been haunting me my whole life.

This story will mark the halfway point of my writing quest – what have you thought of it so far? Today’s story was suggested by Elm 🙂

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There are a lot of things in life that go unnoticed. I guess I’ve got used to being one of them.

To most people, a lamp-post is completely functional, and yes, that is what it has been designed to be. But I’ve become one of those people who can see past the mundane, ordinary things, and turn them into something extraordinary.

I suppose it is all thanks to my nana. When she was in her thirties, she went to an art school one summer, where they told her that “Art can be anywhere, you just have to know what you’re looking for.” Since then she’s become fixated on turning ordinary things into art forms.

This year we started work on a project together at her insistence, although I still believe that anything I could do pales into insignificance beside anything my grandmother can design.

“Lamp-posts are such wasted pieces of real estate,” she said one day as we walked through the park.

“What do you mean?”

She sighed, as she often did when I failed to see the insanely brilliant ideas in her mind. “What if there was a way to make the lamp-posts themselves…a bit more special?”

As she began to muse, I began to realise what she was talking about. It normally took a while for me to see the world the way she did, but when I did, I grew to love her ideas, I always did.

My dad didn’t feel the same way. “Are you serious?” He asked Nana when she explained our idea. “You can’t be serious.”

“We’re deadly serious,” she said, the same quiet fire in her eyes that always persuaded my dad to agree with whatever crazy plan she came up with.

He sighed. “You can’t overwork yourself, this is a lot to take on. And besides, you know that the council are never going to agree to this.”

As my dad returned to his washing up, Nana winked at me and said, “Come on Sam, we’ve got a lot to do.”

And so six months later, we are halfway through our task of hanging our art on every lamp-post in the local park. It was Nana’s decision to hang each one as soon as we paint it, instead of hoarding them all and waiting to do them all at once.

Now when I walk through the park, as I often do, I can smile and see all of the incredible drawings that garnish the normally generic metal poles. I guess it’s also turned into a bit of a memory garden, because every time I see one of the pictures, I can clearly remember the day when we painted it.

We still have a long way to go, but I never really thought that this park would feel as special to me as it does now.

Thanks to my grandmother, I feel at home in a place I never really thought I would be.

Welcome to Part 3 of Drag and Drop Stories: this time I am setting my story in a hospital ward, thanks to Ocean.

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I feel like the designers of the orange hospital chair seem to have created it so that it is the most uncomfortable seat in existence. That or they want to keep them so clean that they discourage anyone from sitting on them and covering them in bacteria by being so horrible to sit on that no-one wants to for longer than thirty seconds.

That or I am so tense that any seat would feel like it’s digging knives into my back.

“Sam?” Instantly my head shoots up to see the tailored suit that my father wears to work every day. Well, he used to.

“You can go in now,” he murmurs, gesturing to the door. He can’t meet my eyes, and I feel like bursting into tears, because the man stood before me, normally the one to punch me on the shoulder and cheer me up when I’m crying, suddenly looks very small, and very alone.

“It’s okay, Dad,” I say, trying to muster up some kind of believable hope. He seems to be oblivious to anything I’m saying, and just waves me through the door, turning his back so that the people on the bustling ward can’t see him cry.

Oh God, what am I walking in to? My feet appear to be rooted to the ground, and it’s all I can do to place a trembling hand on the door handle and fight every instinct in my body telling me to put about three miles of distance between myself and any hospital.

She’s laying on a hollow frame of a bed with stark white sheets and a line in her arm. Judging by the deep breaths she’s taking and the relative inactivity of the heart monitor, she’s calm, for now.

With shaking hands I trace the line of the soon-to-be permanent scar on her arm, avoiding looking up at her face. I know that person isn’t my mother, not this shell of a human being, void of life, void of emotion and expression.

My eyes begin to well up with tears as I look at the bald head, the sunken eyes and the pale skin. I’m not crying because I don’t agree with her looking like this, I’m crying because I know that she was so much more than that.

I look at her and I can still see the woman who bakes cupcakes every Friday afternoon, the woman who patched me up after I fell off my bike, the woman who invited the family whose car broke down into our house while they waited for the mechanic.

The one person that I believed, and still believe, is capable of doing anything.

“Mum,” I whisper, perching myself gingerly on the edge of the bed. “Er, hey. It’s me. I… I don’t know if you can hear me, but I’m just going to assume that you can. How are you doing? They said that I should just talk normally to you, but…”

“Sam?” My father calls from the doorway, standing next to a nurse in a starched white apron. They’re not smiling.

“Sam, we have to go. Jess is still at Grandma and Grandpa’s house.”

“I’ve only been in here for five minutes,” It’s ridiculous to even attempt to say anything, not in this sterile clinical world where there’s no time to accommodate feelings into the schedule.

“Sam, come on, the nurse needs to give your mother her checkup,” he says, reaching out and, in the gentlest way possible, dragging me away from her.

“I…I can’t.”

“Excuse me?” says the nurse, holding a clipboard as if it instantly makes her the most important person in the room.

“I can’t leave, what if…” I take a deep breath to try and steady my erratic breathing, tears beginning to fall. “What if I don’t see her again?”

My father starts to pull on my hand with more force, “Sam, come on. You’re making this even harder for everyone.”

Slowly, agonisingly, he pulls me away, as the nurse begins to adjust the monitors, tapping at screens, but not giving me any more time with my mother. It’s not like I have much left.

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So that was part three! Leave any suggestions for future stories and opinions on this story in the comments below 🙂

So this is part two of my week-long writing quest, in which I attempt to be American – apologies to all you Americans if I manage to horribly fail at portraying your culture. This story is based on a prompt by gxxdbyeagony, who said that I should write about a school in honour of the back to school season. Yup, it’s coming. Sorry everyone.

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“I guess this is it, then.”

I whirl around to see him standing in the hallway. We have stood together in these same positions a thousand times over, talking, laughing, planning our futures. Until the moment our futures landed on our front porch and we realised our days here were numbered. Gone are the forgotten homeworks, and the failed assignments. Gone are the broken hearts, the casual flirting and the shattering disappointments. All that stands between us now are four years of memories, a varsity jacket and a faded cheerleading uniform.

He walks towards me, his scarlet graduation gown trailing along behind him, and I cannot help smiling.

“I thought you told your mom to shorten the gown,” I say, a smile on my face despite the waves of tears threatening to escape my eyes. It’s funny, his face doesn’t betray any emotion, but after years of learning to read his every movement I can tell he feels the same way.

“Nah,” he says, “she took one look at me and started bawling.”

I laugh. “Mine too. Although she wouldn’t let me leave without at least two dozen pictures.”

He chuckles, running his fingers through his sandy hair, and smiles my favourite crooked grin.

I turn my gaze away, feeling my eyes well up. Sammy was the nickname he gave to me when we were six years old, and we could spend countless days in a treehouse playing make-believe. “Miss” seemed too tame a word for the gaping hole he would leave in my heart when he left.

“Hey,” he says softly, reaching out and lacing his fingers through mine. “Don’t cry. These are happy memories.”

I look up at him again, the first tears beginning to roll down my face. “I know. I just don’t want it to end. I wish this year could last forever.”

He sighs, shaking his head. “It’s not the end. Not really. You should be happy, scholarship to Yale and all. I mean, I’m still sure that I would beat you to the top of the class, but…”

I turn, wandering down the hall, stopping in front of locker 312. Instinctively my hand reaches out and turns the lock, the numbers coming easily after years of practise. A click; my locker swings open to reveal emptiness. Just a few short months ago, this same locker would have contained volumes of textbooks, papers and photographs. Seeing it here now, bare and desolate, feels like a metaphor for my feelings: the strange nothingness inside, neither good nor bad, just… nothing.

“Hey,” he calls, walking to stand beside me. “You missed something.”

Carefully, he reaches into the depths of the box, pulling out a small framed photograph that was trapped between the locker and the one underneath. He hands it to me without a word; I turn the oak frame over, and once again I can feel myself welling up with tears. My eyes pore over the balloons around the border and come to rest on the figures in the foreground. He has his arm around her shoulder, they have smiles on their faces and laughter in their eyes. A girl’s senior prom is supposed to be the most magical night of her life…

The soft lilting melody of the song we danced to floats around my mind, and for one moment I can just forget what is about to happen.

“It’s so scary,” he murmurs from behind me. “The moment we walk up onto that stage and get our diplomas, we’re done here.”

I can’t even register his words. I continue to stare, my eyes glazing over, silently willing myself into the picture. That tiny piece of the past seems so much better with the terrifying future I am about to face. Sighing, I reach up and adjust my fringe, dabbing at my eyes so my mascara doesn’t smudge.

A roar from the nearby sports fields makes me tear my eyes away from the photograph. Sighing, I turn to face him again. “We should go.”

He takes my hands and folds them over the photograph. “Just because everything else is changing doesn’t mean our memories will.”

Hand in hand, we walk together down the hall, reluctant adults longing to return to childhood, waiting for the bell to ring, and the next lesson to begin.

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That was a lot more emotional than I thought it would be. Speaking of emotions, today happens to be the day that I have reached 50 followers, and also the day where I’ve made my 30th post. That is incredible, I genuinely never ever thought that I would get this far with my blog: I’ve made so many new awesome friends and I’ve written and opened up so much about my life.

When I started this blog on March 1st, I thought I’d last a couple of weeks at the most. But it has grown into so much more than that and I am incredibly grateful to everyone who has helped me and supported me throughout all of this.

Here we go! This is the first instalment of this little writing series, based on a comment left by Yazy on my previous post.

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Corsets really should be against the law. After fifteen minutes of intense frustration and fiddling with the laces at the back to try and loosen this cage of oppression I sighed in defeat – well, I attempted to sigh in defeat, but due to the fact that there appeared to be a fabric monster squeezing my oesophagus, the most I could let out was a shaky breath – and threw myself onto the bed, face first. Punching the pillows didn’t give me much satisfaction or make me feel better, so I just buried my head under the sheets and sobbed.

I don’t think it was possible for the arrival of a guest to go any more wrong. Firstly, I tripped down the stairs as they walked through the front gates, then I choked on my tea during the refreshments, and just when I thought it couldn’t get any worse, I somehow managed to trip up the visiting Lord because my shoelace was untied while we danced. And I managed to step on his feet every other second.

As soon as their carriage had left the grounds I began to receive my lecture. A long one.

Sadly, the day’s horrors were far from being over.

I heard someone knocking on the door, but I ignored it, hoping and praying that whoever was at the door would just leave me in peace and go away.

“Samantha?” called an annoyingly familiar voice, “Are you in there?”

I groaned, burying my head ever deeper into the comforting scent and welcoming darkness of the sheets, attempting to put as much distance between myself and the surface as physically possible.

I liked to imagine myself as one of the otters that I watched wistfully from my bedroom window, gracefully darting through the river, happy, carefree. Because it’s not like I’m any of those things in real life.

“I’m coming in!”

The door creaked open, and instantly I heard an exclamation of disgust. The way to know that my mother has walked into a room.

“Samantha! That dress was a gift!” She practically screamed, rushing to save the violet silk dress I had thrown off at the first possible opportunity and left on the hard stone floor. “And get up from that bed! You’ll ruin your hair!”

She stalked over to the bed, ripping the sheets off and grabbing the end of my messy plait, forcing me out of my makeshift sanctuary.

“What do you think you’re doing?” She spat, “You are aware that the Duke and Duchess are arriving for dinner tonight and you were supposed to stay in that gown all day! Now look at you!” She grabbed a brush and started to yank it through my hair, completely ignoring my yelps of pain.

“Do you have any idea how important this dinner party is for your sister? If this goes right, she will be able to marry the Duke’s son, and then, it will be your turn! You are not going to mess this up: you are a respectable young lady and you need to start acting like one!” She deftly braided my hair into a long plait and pulled the dress on over the corset.

I balled my fists, staring at a spot on the ground to try and level my heavy breathing, but remained silent. I’ve learned from years of answering back and trying to argue that it’s hopeless. And after all, “it’s not very becoming of a young lady”. I hate that phrase. Every time I want to climb a tree, or get a minuscule stain on my dress instantly I am screeched at like I just murdered ten people.

“Samantha, look at me! Are you going to say anything? You can’t talk to guests properly, you’re clumsy, you have no etiquette, and you walk like… like a boy!” She seemed to place the word boy among horse dung and poverty in terms of words that she liked.

She was rummaging through my wardrobe, reappearing with a hideous fuschia headdress that I thought I had hidden underneath everything else I owned as soon as I got it. “It is your duty as a respectable young lady to be married as soon as you turn eighteen. Luckily we still have a few years left, because, believe me, you have a long way to go.”

She glided out of the room effortlessly as if she hadn’t just doomed her daughter to a miserable, slave-like existence. And I stayed silent and shocked, having been doomed to said miserable existence.

Suddenly something snapped inside me, and I ran to my armchair, dragging it towards the door and using it to temporarily prevent any more unwanted guests from entering my room. I’d been hearing this same speech for weeks, months, years on end, and I had had enough.

Shaking, my hands reached for the large sewing scissors kept in my needlework box, along with many failed cushion covers and headdress with fraying edges. Slowly, I edged them closer and closer to the edge of my plait.

I can’t do this. Am I really considering alienating my family forever? My mother would have surely disowned me if she saw me. But her words floated back to me: “You’ve got a long way to go. You can’t talk to guests properly, you have no etiquette, and you walk like…like a boy!” I definitely know that I would rather have been born a boy. No needlework, no entertaining of guests, no studies, no housework.

I would be able to go on quests and go riding and get stains on my clothes and learn archery and all those incredible forbidden things I have seen young boys practising for years. It would be seen as brave if I climbed a tree, not unbecoming, and if I wanted to, I could simply leave and go exploring and adventuring and see the world beyond the stone walls and hedges rather seem to be slowly closing in on me.

My sister wants to get married, settle down, have children, and basically turn into one of the stone statues

This is my life. Surely I should be allowed to live it the way that I choose.

The golden plait fell to the floor.

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So, what did you think of my first story? Leave thoughts, comments, and suggestions for more stories in the comments!

So… I have decided to do something new this week. It’s an idea that I’ve been thinking about for several weeks now, and I am now “launching” it. That makes it sound like a spaceship or something.

I am an immense lover of creative writing: I write so many different stories, short ones, long ones that I never finish and so many other ones. So I’ve decided to combine my love of writing with this blog, another one of my loves.

Now this is easier said than done. I’m definitely not committed to writing an incredibly long story on here, and I thought that just one short story wasn’t enough.

That’s when I had an idea.

Why don’t I involve you, my amazing readers and followers? So I came up with something that I like to call Drag-and-Drop Writing. I have created a character – to be revealed later – and I will be dragging and dropping, as it were, this character into various situations every day this week. Yup, every day.

Where will I be getting this situations, you may ask? Well, I’m leaving that up to you. All of my stories will be taken from suggestions and prompts left in the comments of the posts.

What is a prompt? It can be an idea, a time, a place, a situation, really anything that I can use as inspiration to write a story 🙂

I’m going to try to do as many different genres of story as I can, but they will all be around 500 words.

This is where I leave it up to you guys. If you’ve never commented before, please do! I don’t bite 🙂 And feel free to leave more than one comment as well, I’d love to have a lot to choose from!

So, racism. It’s one of the biggest causes of conflict between human beings, right up there with sexism, homophobia and religion. Sadly, it’s a lot bigger than we’d like it to be. There are hate crimes, there are murders, there are assaults. And I know that they are the most extreme forms of racism, but they happen.

I’m not going to talk about that. What I’m talking about today is my own experiences with racism. As a person who is half-Asian, half-white, I’m not as “black” as some people, which has saved me from a lot of racism, I’m sure.

And I put the word “black” in inverted commas because I really don’t like that word when used to describe people.

But that definitely doesn’t mean I haven’t experienced some racial hate in my time.

Actually there’s one moment that I can remember ridiculously clearly, because it was the first time that someone made me feel like I was different to everybody else.

I was eleven years old, and my primary school was putting on a production of Cinderella for our school play that year. Now, I like to act and I love singing, so I thought I could be Cinderella. Why not? My class was the oldest in the school, so I thought I would have a decent shot at the main part.

I started learning the piece of Cinderella audition script and all was right in my little eleven-year old brain.

It happened one day in the week before the audition when all of the girls in the class were on a bench discussing the play and what parts we wanted to be. In case you were wondering, there were only twelve of us. It wasn’t a massively large bench.

So when it came to my turn, I said that I was going to audition for Cinderella. That’s when this girl called Paige pipes up and says, “What? You can’t be Cinderella, you’re black!”

The table went rather quiet, and I sat there silently, a tiny bit hurt, but mostly confused, because I’d never been called that before. I’d never felt like I was different from everyone else because of the colour of my skin.

I started to look around, and realised that I was the only one with brown skin among a group of ivory-skinned girls. And I started to feel sad. Like I wasn’t good enough.

Sadly, I let that get to me, and I decided not to audition for Cinderella. Coincidentally, the girl they picked for Cinderella had fair skin, blue eyes and long blonde hair. Hmm.

Now, I hope that the people I surround myself with are more accepting of me and my skin colour, because this generation is starting to realise that people are all the same, no matter their race, religion, sexual orientation etc.

I understand that the girl who insulted me was eleven herself, and probably didn’t realise what she was saying. But it still hurt. And I hope that people of my age nowadays, and even eleven year olds nowadays, are starting to be taught in a way that accepts everyone.

After all, we learn from our parents. The apple never falls far from the tree.

I kinda realised something that has been at the back of my mind for a while now, but it hasn’t really come to the surface until now. I’m running out of time.

I am definitely not talking about my entire life, because hopefully *touch wood, yes I’m superstitious* I’m going to live for a long while. But my childhood, aka the only thing I have ever known, is slowly but surely, coming to a close.

In a few years, I’ll be on my own: I won’t have my sister barging into my room asking to borrow half the things I own, I won’t have my mother yelling at me to unload the dishwasher, I won’t have my bedroom, my bed, my house. I’ll be somewhere completely new, with a brand new life. Alone. And yes, I’ll come home for holidays etc. but it won’t be the same. Ever.

This time next year I’ll get a set of results that will begin to define my life. This time next year I might have to say goodbye to people I care about if they go to different schools. This time next year I’ll be close to becoming a legal adult. I’ll be closer to leaving my home, my family, my friends.
And I’m terrified.

I don’t know what I want to do with my life, not like some other people I know who have concrete plans. I’m not allowed a boyfriend! How am I going to manage this?

I know what I’m scared of. I’m terrified that I’m not ready, I won’t be able to accomplish my dreams, and then I will regret my entire life and wish I could have done something to make my dreams come true. Because I want that more than anything.

Sometimes I swear I can feel it slipping away, and I desperately want to go back to being eight years old, where if I was upset I could hide under my blankets and I could spend countless days sat in my garden with a cardboard box, no worries, no responsibilities. My biggest worry was whether or not I would be served broccoli at dinner, and I genuinely didn’t care about what anyone thought of me.

I guess what I’m trying to say is that I don’t want it to end. Not yet.

There are so many people I know who look on the first eighteen years of their life, and say that it was the best time of their lives. And they’re right.

But I am trying not to believe that. It can’t all be downhill from here, can it?

Love from,

XXX

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Hello!

Welcome to my little blog, I hope you like it!
Take the time to stay and look around, and get a glimpse into my world.
I am a creative writer, which normally leads to me thinking too much, and I normally blog about whatever life throws at me.
All of my posts are in letter form to my friend Emma, who moved away when I started my blog.